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v010dya
Asked: 2013-11-26 05:48:38 +0800 CST

What do + and - mean in the output of jobs command?

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I cannot find the answer anywhere. When i have several jobs that are in the background and i list them with jobs i get the following:

[1]   Stopped                 command1
[2]   Stopped                 command2
[3]-  Stopped                 command3
[4]+  Stopped                 command4

The plus sign is always on the last one, and the minus is on the second to last. What do these things mean?

command-line

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    They'll always be the latest and latest-minus-one running jobs.

    Their only purpose, as far as I can tell, is to provide a shorthand for those two latest jobs so you can reference them as fg - instead of fg %3. This makes it fairly trivial to spin between two or three processes.

    TLDP seems to corroborate this (see Table 15-1. Job identifiers)

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